Gimson as a maker

 

As a young architect in Sedding’s office and as an active member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Gimson was encouraged to get hands-on experience of different building crafts. Sedding himself had produced designs for plasterwork while he was working in Bristol in the 1860s and in the 1880s Gimson visited Haddon and Hardwick Halls in Derbyshire as well as other Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings to sketch the fine sixteenth-century plasterwork.

 

He began to try his hand at modelling in plaster early in 1890 through an arrangement with a London firm of plasterworkers, Messrs Whitcombe and Priestly. He would go out to work on their orders for plasterwork but also pay them for the experience, for a working space and materials to create his own designs. The firm had links to the Arts & Crafts Movement. One of the partners, Joseph Whitcombe, was credited with the execution of plaster friezes designed by Philip Webb, Mervyn Macartney and Reginald Blomfield shown in the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1888.

 

Most Victorian plasterwork was produced in two stages by different craftsmen. To begin with a modeller produced a positive version of the design by modelling in clay or carving in wood. Another craftsman then made a mould from this original either in gelatine or plaster of Paris and the final cast was produced.

 

 

Whitcombe was not used to professional men – architects and designers – wanting to cast and model their own plaster designs. He was puzzled by Gimson’s enthusiasm for this wet and dirty material. By June 1890 Gimson was becoming proficient, describing his routine to his friend, W R Butler:

He exhibited a plaster frieze at the third Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London in October that year.

 

Other friends and colleagues were also working in plaster. Henry Wilson, who took over Sedding’s architectural practice after his death in 1891, received a number of commissions from the Duke of Portland in the 1890s. Plasterwork featured prominently at one commission at Welbeck Abbey in Worksop, Nottinghamshire. The work was carried out by John Paul Cooper. Cooper began to experiment with gesso, a mixture of plaster and glue. He made wooden boxes decorated with low-relief decoration in gesso which was then painted and gilded. He showed one such box in the 1893 Arts and Crafts Exhibition. Another Leicester man, George Bankart who had trained as an architect with Gimson in Isaac Barradale’s office, also moved to London and took up plasterwork.